Soul City

by Thomas Healy

  The size of the project created other complications, too. If Soul City was going to support a population of fifty thousand, it would need a massive supply of water, both for drinking and for all the other routines of daily life: bathing, washing clothes and dishes, watering lawns and gardens. If each resident used eighty gallons a day (a conservative estimate), the city would need a supply of at least four million gallons daily. And that didn’t even account for the water required by industry: a single factory might consume several hundred thousand gallons a day, and Soul City would need numerous factories to provide jobs for its residents. Then, of course, because what goes in must come out, the city would need an extensive sewer system to dispose of all that water, not to mention the solid waste generated by residents and the toxic waste generated by industry.

  The Circle P Ranch had none of these things. The water for farming and ranching had come from a series of wells on the property, which provided only eighty-eight thousand gallons of water a day. The waste from livestock had been treated in septic tanks, which also had limited capacity. Warrenton, nine miles away, drew its water from Fishing Creek, a tributary of the Tar River that flowed just south of Soul City. But Fishing Creek wasn’t big enough to provide water for both Warrenton and Soul City. As for sewer treatment, Warrenton relied on an ancient system that was already overburdened and in need of repairs; there was no way it could handle the additional waste from Soul City.

  In addressing these challenges, McKissick and his staff had two choices. They could put together a patchwork of water sources—from Kerr Lake, the Roanoke River, and various ground impoundments—and discharge the city’s waste into Fishing, Rocky, and Matthews Creeks. Or they could join with Warren County and its two neighbors—Vance and Granville counties—to build a regional water and waste-treatment system. The former approach was simpler since it wouldn’t require the cooperation of local officials, many of whom had been lukewarm in their reaction to Soul City. But the latter approach would provide a more reliable, long-term solution. It might also make allies of the very officials who had been uneasy about McKissick’s plans. Water and waste had been nagging problems for a number of nearby towns. Oxford, the county seat of Granville, had recently installed a temporary water line because of emergencies brought on by a dry summer, while Henderson, in Vance County, had been looking for an additional source of water to promote industrial growth. If Soul City could secure federal money to build a regional water and waste-treatment system, officials in those towns might view their prospective neighbor in a new light. “The mutual needs for water can be of inestimable value in fostering cooperation amongst the various municipal and county governments,” the staff explained to HUD. McKissick therefore decided to pursue funding for a regional system, while making contingency plans in the event Soul City was forced to provide water and waste disposal on its own.

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  ONCE MCKISSICK DECIDED how big Soul City would be, there was the question of what it would look like. Would residential, commercial, and industrial uses be combined, as in large northeastern cities such as New York and Philadelphia? Or would they be strictly separated, as in many new suburban developments? How dense would the city be—low and sprawling, like Phoenix? Or vertical and compact, like San Francisco? Would residents rely on cars, or would they navigate the city by bus, bicycle, and foot? And what style of architecture and design would the city have? Traditional? Modern? Or something in between?

  As with questions about soil, water, and sewerage, McKissick hadn’t considered any of these details prior to announcing his plans. But he had decided one thing: he didn’t want Soul City to be just another town, indistinguishable from the northern metropolises that were currently in turmoil. He was determined to build a new kind of city, one that would avoid the mistakes of the past and serve as a model for the future. As he put it in marketing materials, Soul City would offer residents—and the country—“a fresh start.”

  In pursuing this goal, McKissick was aided by a wealth of new thinking about urban design. The decades after World War II marked a coming-of-age for city planning in the United States. Spurred by the postwar demand for housing and emboldened by technological advances and a flood of federal money, planning had evolved from a quaint gentleman’s pastime into a sophisticated profession. Dozens of new planning schools opened, student enrollment soared, and cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh hired prominent architects to redesign their urban cores. Perhaps most emblematic of this evolution was the 1956 Urban Design Conference at Harvard, a historic gathering of two hundred city planners, architects, and critics who were determined to rethink how American cities were conceived and built.

  One of the speakers at that conference was an obscure writer for Architectural Forum named Jane Jacobs. Filling in for the magazine’s editor, Jacobs challenged the prevailing consensus that slum areas should be razed and replaced with massive blocks of high-rise apartments. To Jacobs, there was a “weird wisdom” in the chaos of urban neighborhoods, and she warned against attempts to impose an artificial order on them. “The city has its own peculiar virtues, and we will do it no service by trying to beat it into some inadequate imitation of the non-city,” she argued. On the strength of that address and a subsequent article in Fortune, Jacobs received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to write a book on urban planning. The result, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was published in 1961. In it, Jacobs attacked the entire premise of midcentury planning, which sought to create efficient, regimented communities where commercial and residential life were strictly divided. She argued that cities, as well as the districts and streets that comprise them, thrive on diversity—not racial diversity, although Jacobs certainly embraced ethnic pluralism, but diversity of uses. To generate and maintain this diversity, she believed, four principles had to be observed. City blocks should be short, to allow for frequent exploration of side streets; neighborhoods should serve multiple functions, to attract traffic throughout the day; buildings should vary in age and condition, to support a range of rents; and cities should be dense, to promote vitality. In making this last point, Jacobs distinguished between density and overcrowding, which most planners had conflated. Overcrowding exists when too many people live in a single residence, she explained, while density is a measure of how many people live on a given acre of land. Because building heights vary, low-density areas can be overcrowded, while high-density areas might have no overcrowding at all. The problems most planners were trying to solve—poor health, lack of sanitation, social disorder—resulted from overcrowding, not high density. Yet planners often treated the two as interchangeable.

  Jacobs’s book was groundbreaking, drawing lavish praise from reviewers. (William Whyte, author of the best-selling The Organization Man, called it “one of the most remarkable books ever written about the city.”) And despite some resistance from the planning establishment, which dismissed its author as a “militant dame” with no formal training, it shook up the world of urban design, laying the foundation for what would eventually be called New Urbanism, a movement advocating mixed-use zoning, density, walkability, and environmental sustainability. But as Jacobs herself acknowledged, her ideas were relevant mainly to “great cities” such as New York and Chicago, not to suburbs, towns, and smaller cities, which posed their own challenges. There was also something slightly elitist and naive about her vision. She seemed not to fully account for how miserable life had been in the demolished slums. Yes, the massive blocks of high-rise housing projects were ugly and soulless. But they had indoor plumbing and proper ventilation, amenities their precursors lacked. Most importantly, Jacobs didn’t explain how her vision of a diverse, dynamic city—reflected in her own Manhattan neighborhood of Greenwich Village—could be replicated on a scale large enough to absorb the projected surge in population over the next half century. Although she didn’t explicitly reject the idea of new towns, her theory implied that it was folly. Because diversity required buildings of varying ages and condi
tions, a new town would struggle to achieve the mingling of uses she thought necessary for a thriving city.

  McKissick and his staff were heavily influenced by Jacobs, especially her emphasis on walkability and vibrant street life. But they were even more influenced by James Rouse, who was in some ways the anti-Jacobs. Although Jacobs and Rouse were equally horrified by the high-rise housing projects and suburban sprawl that marked the postwar period, their solutions were wildly different. Whereas Jacobs favored large, dense cities like New York, Rouse thought many American cities had become too big, fostering a sense of “loneliness, irresponsibility, and superficial values.” He preferred small, intimate towns where children walked to school and neighbors waved to each other from their front porches—towns like Easton, Maryland, where he had been born and raised. In addition, whereas Jacobs was suspicious of experts and planners, believing that “big plans can make big mistakes,” Rouse thought the urban crisis could only be solved by a sociological approach. To Rouse, the problem wasn’t too much planning but not enough. In a speech delivered in 1967, he assailed the haphazard development of the urban landscape. “Our cities grow by sheer chance—by accident, by whim of the private developer and public agencies,” he complained. “Thousands of small separate decisions made with little or no relationship to one another, nor to their composite impact, produce a major decision about the future of our cities and our civilization—a decision we have come to label suburban sprawl. What nonsense this is! What reckless, irresponsible dissipation of nature’s endowment and of man’s hope for dignity, beauty, growth!”

  To mitigate this problem in Columbia, Rouse convened an advisory group of fourteen experts from a variety of fields: education, psychology, sociology, public health, economics, and engineering. Meeting every other week for six months, the group issued recommendations on nearly every aspect of city life, from the optimal size of elementary schools to the best mix of commercial and civic institutions to the most effective way to provide health care. Rouse didn’t accept all the group’s recommendations, but its work informed his vision of Columbia as an environmentally friendly, racially integrated, and economically diverse community that would promote individual flourishing—or as he put it, “a garden for growing people.”

  Physically, Columbia aimed to combine the benefits of a larger city with the sense of community found in smaller towns. It consisted of nine villages arranged around a town center. Each village was divided into four or five neighborhoods, and each neighborhood consisted of a series of cul-de-sacs within walking distance of an elementary school. On paper, the villages resembled clovers, with the neighborhoods forming separate leaves. In the middle of each village (where the clover’s leaves joined) was a small shopping center, a secondary school, a library, a medical center, banks, and restaurants. At the center of the entire city was a large shopping mall, a man-made lake, and a forty-acre park featuring an outdoor amphitheater. In an effort to preserve the beauty of the natural environment, power lines were buried underground, and large billboards were banned. But despite the involvement of some prominent architects (a young Frank Gehry designed the amphitheater), the physical environment was drab and uninspiring, consisting mostly of brown brick buildings and imitation Swiss chalets.

  Rouse liked to refer to Columbia as “the next America,” believing it would provide a blueprint for the cities of tomorrow. He was therefore generous with his time and resources, offering free advice to other developers and inviting them to Columbia to train with his staff. The arrangement was so popular it became known as Rouse University, and in the summer of 1969, McKissick and three members of his staff (Carey, Clayton, and finance director Skip Tolbert) enrolled. For two weeks they followed a regular course of study, meeting with the Rouse “faculty,” touring the Columbia “campus,” and tape recording every “class” as though preparing for a final exam. They learned the secret to creating a viable economic model (“The trick is to keep your major expenditures stretched out, so that your cash flow doesn’t look so crumby”); the need to keep meticulous records (“because things you’ve never thought of are going to happen”); the value of a streamlined corporate structure (“Keep the organization simple, don’t complicate it”); and the hazards of setting expectations too high (“The disenchantment can be appreciable”).

  They also learned the importance of creating a master plan before recruiting residents or industry. “You can’t sell anything without a plan,” they were advised. “Everybody in the world is skeptical. Projects like this go broke more than they succeed.”

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  IN DRAFTING A plan for Soul City, McKissick had hoped to rely on Ifill Johnson Hanchard, the architectural firm he had retained shortly after his announcement. But it specialized in designing buildings, not cities, so McKissick began searching for a planner who could handle all aspects of the physical design, from housing to transportation to utilities. He found just the man at the MIT School of Architecture, which was advising Soul City on an informal basis. His name was Harvey Gantt, and he was exactly what McKissick was looking for. He was Black, so he furthered the goal of self-sufficiency. He was well-educated, so his intelligence could not be questioned. And he was a trailblazer, having made news as the first Black student to attend Clemson University (and on his way to much bigger things). Gantt’s only weakness was a lack of experience. After graduating from Clemson with a degree in architecture, he had worked for a firm in Charlotte for just three years before enrolling in the master’s program at MIT. But finding Black professionals with any real estate experience was a challenge. As McKissick told reporters, he had identified seventy-two job categories—from city attorney to sanitary engineer—in which Blacks were completely unrepresented. Besides, one of the goals of Soul City was to serve as a training ground for young Black professionals. So McKissick invited Gantt to Harlem for an interview and offered him the job. Gantt, who was being recruited by prestigious architectural firms in New York and Boston, was initially dubious. Looking around at McKissick’s threadbare office, he wondered why a famous civil rights leader was building a new town. But when McKissick explained the theory behind Soul City, Gantt was sold. Millions of poor Black southerners had moved north in search of a better life only to find disappointment, McKissick told him. Why not provide them with jobs and a decent place to live right where they were, in the South?

  McKissick couldn’t afford to offer Gantt a proper salary, so Jack Parker gave him a teaching position at UNC to supplement his income. Gantt’s friends thought he was mad, passing up offers at established firms to join a fledgling company that couldn’t even afford to pay him. They also worried McKissick was a modern-day Marcus Garvey, building an all-Black community that would undo the progress of the previous twenty years. Gantt insisted they were wrong. “Floyd’s a civil rights leader,” he told them. “He’s not interested in separatism like Marcus Garvey. This is a different story.”

  Gantt was not in Columbia during the summer of 1969, but he made several trips there, and it strongly influenced his design. Like Columbia, Soul City would consist of a collection of villages arranged around a town center. Each village would have its own style and identity, but all would be racially and economically diverse, mixing single-family homes, town houses, garden apartments, and mid-rise residential buildings. At the heart of each village would be an “activity center,” with a grocery store, a gas station, a library, a post office, a medical center, a barbershop, a beauty salon, restaurants, and banks. And at the heart of the entire city would be a town center providing citywide services, such as a central library, a museum, a hospital, a college, and a shopping mall. Just north of the town center, adjacent to the railroad tracks and I-85, would lie the industrial park. Consisting of eight hundred acres, it would be close to the villages, to shorten commute times (the goal was ten minutes), but separated from them by a man-made lake that would serve as both a buffer and a source of water for fire protection.

  As for transportation, a major boulevard would
bisect the city on a north-south axis, an inner loop road would link the villages, and a series of collector roads and local streets would wind through the residential neighborhoods. Speed limits would be low—thirty miles per hour on the boulevard, ten miles per hour on local streets—and sidewalks would be wide, to encourage pedestrian traffic. A network of bike paths would connect each village to the others. As the city grew, Gantt hoped most residents would forgo cars for walking and biking. He also envisioned an extensive public transit system, with regular bus service to the nearby towns of Henderson and Oxford and, eventually, light-rail service to Raleigh-Durham and Richmond.

  A tract plan of the first phase of Soul City shows Green Duke Village (bottom) and the industrial park, with a man-made lake separating them.

  Because Soul City was intended to provide urban amenities within a pastoral setting, it would feature a vast network of parks and open spaces. Gantt’s design called for five community parks spread across the city, a large central park near the town center, and dozens of smaller playgrounds and picnic areas. In addition, one-third of the land would remain undeveloped, leaving wide swaths of woods, meadows, and wilderness available for recreation and animal habitats.

  Gantt spent most of his time planning the city, not designing buildings, but early sketches suggest the prevailing aesthetic, which could best be described as 1970s contemporary. The buildings are low and modular, made of glass, brick, and precast concrete. There is little ornamentation—no columns, cornices, or arches—and the dominant colors are brown, tan, and orange, as in an episode of The Brady Bunch. But the renderings, with their clean lines and uncluttered facades, have a sleekness that contrasts with the squalor and disarray then prevalent in many big cities. Looking at Gantt’s sketches next to archival photographs of East Baltimore or the South Bronx, it is easy to see how Soul City might have seemed like a welcome solution to the urban crisis.